Re: are Java programmers unfriendly and harsh people?

On Apr 14, 4:24 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Andrew Thompson <andrewtho...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
As someone who has (is), I would like to try and convey
that the experience is different to using a news client
(which I have also done) in many very obvious, and some
more subtle ways.

One of the major differences is that a WITUN poster
is *much* less likely to 'pick things up by infusion'.
To explain. When posting through a news client, I
would generally get the 'latest message list', and
simply keep hitting 'n(ext)', 'n', 'n'.. till I saw
a post that caught my eye.
....
Now this surprises me. My experience is pretty much
exclusively with old-style text-only newsreaders (trn now,
rn before that, a few experiments with tin and slrn), and:
I don't remember too well about rn (that was a while back),
but I may have used it as you describe. But with trn
and the others, I configure things so that what I get on
entering a newsgroup is a list of subject lines, and for
most of the newsgroups I follow, I select which posts to
read based on subject line.

I note (after a bit of googling) that these
newsreaders are *nix based. My only experience
is with Windows based newsreaders - Outlook Express,
40tude Dialog, and one or two others (that I
cannot immediately recall the names of, they
were that forgettable.)

It is no surprise to me that *nix based news
clients would be built to cater to users who
have a higher technical expertise, or are
more discerning about the software they
install.

With all due respect, I suggest that a similar argument
could be made for just ignoring Usenet completely and
participating instead in -- well, I'm ignorant of such
things, but I think "Web-based forums" may be the phrase
I want.

No web-based forum provides the level of
technical detail, volume of experienced
posters, or the 'forthright discussion'*
that seems to exist on the c.l.j.* usenet
newsgroups.

I also post to the Sun & JDIC Forums, but they
- are very restricted in what you can say*
- do not offer the same level of experience
available through usenet (there are a couple
of questions that I put first to the Sun forums,
that through lack of any response, moved to
usenet and got a good discussion going).
- can sometimes censor words, or entire posts

* Theoretically, some usenet news groups are
also 'very restricted', but while there are
conventions of these groups that are regularly
broken - it seems few people care (even I do
not usually bother to comment).

..But maybe you're thinking that keeping Usenet
going, but with many people participating via what you call
WITUNs, is a good compromise that will allow the old-timers
and the (relative) newbies to continue to interact.

Hell yeah! But even beyond that, it is hard to
tell the difference between (for example) the
Google Groups *representation* of usenet news
groups, and those that are purely 'Google'
Groups.

My Google account offers 'Google Alerts', that
look for keywords of interest to me, and drop an
email when one appears. If I choose to answer a
post on any of the 'Google' Groups, I make a point
of letting the poster know about the c.l.j.*
heirarchy of groups (and WTE 'that is where the
Java gurus hang out'). I imagine that whoever
established the forum must get p*ssed - (shrugs)
not my problem - though several posts to a moderated
forum were 'held up' and did not appear in the
time I could be bothered monitoring it - which
is unfortunate for the OP, but also ..not my problem.

Andrew T.

.

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